Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Down to Earth

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Rock in a Hard Place

Down to Earth is a clumsy vehicle for a talented comic

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Chris Rock's face is a great invention. It's made up of huge, cartoonish features—bulging eyes, giant white smile, dimples that reach almost to his ears—improbably contained in the thin, angular lines of his jaw and high cheekbones. When he grins, he looks like he's been possessed by something twice his size.

But unlike Jim Carrey, who contorts his face in spasms of Loony Tunes self-reinvention, Rock never seems to be playing a character. However exaggerated his expressions, they're always rooted in a personal and deeply felt view of the world. Even at his most deliberately provocative, whether calling right-wing blab babe Laura Ingraham "a bitch" on Politically Incorrect or branding Marion Barry a crackhead before a largely black Washington, D.C., crowd, you never doubt that he means what he says.

So much so, in fact, that he pretty much runs roughshod over everyone else in Down to Earth, a remake of the 1978 Warren Beatty comedy Heaven Can Wait (itself a remake of 1941's Here Comes Mr. Jordan). The plot, you may recall, is about the nature of identity—what makes us us. Through the conceit of one person masquerading in another person's body, it makes the warm fuzzy affirmation that who we are transcends who we look or sound like. In Rock's case, it also transcends the flimsy artifice of the movie's haphazard construction. When Down to Earth works, which it does periodically, it's entirely because Chris Rock is just being himself.

Rock ostensibly plays a bike messenger and aspiring comedian named Lance Barton. Coming home from amateur night at the Apollo, he gets hit by a truck and wakes up in heaven. There, the two angels in charge (Eugene Levy and Chazz Palminteri, in what should have been funny roles but are rarely more than distracting) realize they yanked Lance too soon. But his body's already gone, so they offer him an option: he can return to earth in another guise. He eventually ends up taking the place of Charles Wellington, a wealthy white businessman.

That's where Down to Earth could have lifted off. Rock as a rich white guy raises the same comic potential as Eddie Murphy's classic Saturday Night Live skit in which he disguised himself as a white businessman and found that everything from bank loans to cab rides really were dependent on your color. Race is Rock's great topic—he returns to it over and over in his sporadically hilarious stand-up specials and HBO talk show. At his best, he presents both black and white audiences with hard truths about racial relations in America. No other current comedian is so bold about calling out hypocrisy, regardless of color.

So what better vehicle than to make Chris Rock white? The problem is, the sloppy script (not so much adapted as mangled) and clumsy direction (courtesy of brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, creators of American Pie) never really latch on to the idea. For one thing, while the rest of the world sees "Wellington," we almost exclusively see Rock. That makes a certain kind of sense—he is the star, after all—but it makes it hard for us to imagine he's really a chubby, balding white guy. The cast struggles with the same thing; they're supposed to be reacting to "Wellington," but they're clearly reacting to Rock.

And Rock, for that matter, is not much of an actor. He's been OK in some previous supporting stints, but he's not big on immersing himself in a role. He approaches his dialogue like a comedian, working it for laughs and mug-shots rather than narrative or complexity.

Still, there's some funny stuff in Down to Earth. The best moments are essentially extended riffs by Rock, sometimes during his on-stage segments (playing a comedian ain't that much of a stretch for him) and other times in set pieces where he gets carte blanche to follow his own lightning comic instincts. The best example is in a hospital boardroom scene where Wellington assails his colleagues for putting profits ahead of patients. There's a similar scene in Heaven Can Wait, but where Beatty played it as a stand for principled outrage, Rock carries it to absurd and riotous extremes. ("I don't think we should be turning away people who got shot in the head! Our motto should be, 'Shot in the Head, You Get a Bed!'")

Also worth mentioning is the presence of Regina King as Sontee, the story's love interest. I say presence rather than performance, because like everyone else in Down to Earth, she's hampered by the film's lack of focus and flow. But unlike everyone else except Rock, she registers anyway.

If you've never seen Rock before, Down to Earth isn't the place to start. Rent his comedy specials or the best-of collection from his talk show. But if you can overlook the general messiness, the film does at least give you some screen time with one of the sharpest minds in modern comedy. Chris Rock is still better at being Chris Rock than anyone else.